In the fifth stanza, as elsewhere in the poem, Kipling is trying to convince his American audience just how difficult the colonial project often is. As an Englishman, Kipling is speaking with the benefit of experience, as the British had been successfully running their empire for centuries. And one of the things that Kipling appears to have learned from the British experience is that colonialism is a thankless task.
As very much a man of his time and race, Kipling believes that, on the whole, colonialism is beneficial to what he regards as the "lesser" races, bringing them the benefits of Western civilization. Yet in the fifth stanza, Kipling laments what he perceives as the ingratitude of indigenous peoples for all the effort that the white man has put in to make them more civilized:
Take up the White Man's burden—And reap his old reward, The blame of those ye better, The hate of those ye guard—
Instead of being grateful for colonial rule, as Kipling clearly thinks they ought to be, the natives are deeply resentful, hating their colonial overlords. There's no acknowledgment by Kipling, here or anywhere else in the poem, that indigenous peoples wanted to govern their own affairs, free from the control of Western powers.
http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poems_burden.htm
No comments:
Post a Comment